A complicated beast

A quarter-century after their first collaboration, Ian McEwan and Michael Berkeley have created a new opera. Following a false start, their tale of sexual obsession is finally ready for the stage. They talked to Nicholas Wroe

'It's been a pleasure to write inside music and about music, and to have it set to music' ... Ian McEwan and Michael Berkeley. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

A complicated beast

A quarter-century after their first collaboration, Ian McEwan and Michael Berkeley have created a new opera. Following a false start, their tale of sexual obsession is finally ready for the stage. They talked to Nicholas Wroe

The published version of Ian McEwan 's libretto for Michael Berkeley's opera For You became a collector's item even before its launch in June. There is a signed limited edition hardback, but the standard paperback contains the same bibliographic oddity: on the first page, it proudly announces that the opera received its first performance on "31 May 2008 at Theatr Brycheiniog". It didn't. The opera will be premiered at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio later this month, having been postponed just a few days before the planned premiere in Brecon, an event that should have been one of the highlights of this year's Hay festival.

Opera has a long and honourable tradition of postponed premieres, and Berkeley and McEwan find themselves in good company. Wagner, Verdi, Mozart and many others since endured their share of delays. For Berkeley there is a sense of déjà vu, as the only copy of the score of his opera Jane Eyre was stolen from his car shortly before rehearsals in 2000. The reason for delay this time is more prosaic: the leading singer, baritone Eric Roberts, who had battled against throat problems throughout rehearsals, was forced to withdraw. "We probably should have made a decision earlier," Berkeley says. "Paradoxically, Eric's determination and commitment meant we went right up until the last minute, by which time it was too late to get anyone else."

Alan Opie will sing the role at the Linbury, and while the technical teams have used the intervening months to rejig direction and design, McEwan and Berkeley say they haven't changed a word or note of their study of sexual obsession and overweening artistic arrogance, which centres on an eminent and monstrous composer/ conductor, Charles Frieth, and his increasingly fevered ménage à six with his wife, one of his many lovers, his assistant, housekeeper and family doctor.

Berkeley and McEwan have been friends since the late 70s, when McEwan became a client of Berkeley's wife, the literary agent Deborah Rogers. They mapped out the themes of For You during long country walks, but they have been talking about working on an opera since 1982, when they collaborated on the anti-nuclear weapons oratorio Or Shall We Die?. When the piece was first performed — Richard Eyre filmed it for Channel 4 — it was a popular success, but critically dismissed. It was revived earlier this summer in Cardiff, as part of celebrations of Berkeley's 60th birthday, and the composer had the gratifying experience of several critics apologising to him for their earlier judgments.

Both men say they wouldn't write the piece in exactly the same way today, but they decided not to make any changes for the revival. The theme of a mature artist looking back at the work of his younger self features prominently in For You, with Frieth perplexed at how unmoved he is by his early triumphs. McEwan's own earliest work is regularly reprinted and therefore, potentially, changeable. "I do sometimes pick up early stuff, but all I want to change is the punctuation," he says. "There was a stretch in my early writing life when I wanted to do something different with paragraphs and probably got a little too influenced by Samuel Beckett in using commas for full stops. But that was the story, so it feels wrong to change it. Not that I don't sympathise with people such as Auden who massively revised their work, but thank God for Edward Mendelson, who has ensured that we have the original Auden as well."

Over the years since Or Shall We Die? they have periodically considered adapting novellas by writers including Stefan Zweig, Herman Melville and Hjalmar Söderberg. Zweig and Söderberg in particular led them towards the idea of sexual obsession, and of one character encouraging another to do the thing they wanted to do. As they developed the plot, they laid down ground rules for any performance. McEwan was adamant that he wanted surtitles. Berkeley, after some initial reticence, now declares himself "completely converted" to them, "especially if you have a text where every word counts and the nuances are very important. You can always avert your eyes if you really want to."

McEwan didn't do any specific research into how libretti work, but says his words — "which include much more iambic pentameter than I had first envisaged" — amount to a "measured prose. I wanted a fairly plain, acceptable modern English that wasn't archaic or too bathetically modern: people don't sing: 'Pass the salt '." The other condition they agreed on was "to use the whole operatic train set". There is a Don Giovanni sent to hell ending and opportunities for the singers to combine in a sextet. McEwan says that both he and Berkeley are "always a little disappointed to go to an opera and not get those moments when everyone is singing something different at the same time. Someone is saying 'I thought you loved me', someone else 'Leave me alone', another recapping what's just happened . And they are all in different emotional tones. It's the thing opera can do that no other art form can."

McEwan began writing the libretto in breaks between working on his music-saturated novel On Chesil Beach. He would feed scenes to Berkeley, who would respond by playing McEwan outlines of the music — "mostly via the Sibelius computer programme, which might sound like a band of kazoos, but does contain harmony and everything" — so McEwan had a sense of what his words would sound like from the beginning. "And that was quite a fillip because the words came alive."

McEwan used to "play the flute badly" and so can read music. He also —"and I don't think I've ever told Michael this" — played banjo in a trad jazz band: "Maybe we'll use that if we ever do a Kurt Weill thing. But I am quite interested in the technical side of music, so it's been a particular pleasure to write inside music and about music and, of course, to have it set to music."

Music has long featured in his fiction. The Booker-winning Amsterdamcontained another composer seized by hubris, and a very early short story was about murderous jealousy in a string quartet. He acknowledges that other themes in For You — "the sexual obsession might run out of Enduring Love, the business of how a misunderstanding can lead to catastrophe" — also fit well into his wider body of work.

Berkeley, too, sees the work as an integral part of his career. "I've always been attracted to slightly dark and turbulent things, although I use quite a lyrical language a lot of the time. My clarinet concerto fi ts into that, as does my first opera, Baa Baa Black Sheep, which was really about the child abuse suffered by Rudyard Kipling. Equally, in Jane Eyre, there is ultimately a terrible price paid by the characters."

Berkeley drew on his own early music to reflect Frieth's early work. "When he talks about his oboe concerto, there's a quote from my early oboe concerto, which seemed the right way to make the language of the music organic." Berkeley also drew on personal experience in scoring the tyrannical musician. "I have seen conductors, more often than composers, close to megalomania. I once interviewed Karajan and he had the whole of the Berlin Phil on the stage at the Festival Hall waiting for a rehearsal. Our slot ended, but Karajan wanted to keep talking. After a while there was a rather tentative knock on the door and the leader of the orchestra poked his head round and said, 'Maestro, the orchestra are waiting on the stage.' Karajan literally shouted 'Raus! Raus!' and shooed this rather distinguished musician away."

Yet Berkeley found he had more sympathy for the appalling Charles than he or McEwan anticipated. "Charles is something of a devil, but even he is deeply moved when at his wife's hospital bed, and the music reflects that. And while Ian envisaged his last great work, Demonic Aubade, as being monstrous hyperbole and a pretty unbearable summation of the man, it would have been fatal to end the opera with parody. You can't end with terrible music."

Berkeley notes that Charles is a successful composer, and so he tried to write appropriately powerful music. "And to be honest, I found the wordsrather uplifting in a way that Ian probably thought I shouldn't. Opera likes the volume turned up on emotions, and so what might have started off as parodic and over-the-top works very well operatically."

There are plans for a larger orchestral production in Italy, Switzerland and Germany later this year, but they hope that the current modest size, six singers and 16 musicians, will enable small companies to stage it. Berkeley is aware of the pitfalls. "Opera is a complicated beast. Many concert-hall colleagues steer clear of it because you're really not allowed to fail. Donizetti and Bellini put on loads of operas before they got to the ones that we still play now. That freedom to get things wrong doesn't exist so much now. That's why we've been so careful in terms of working closely with each other, as well as with conductor Michael Rafferty and director Michael McCarthy, to make sure everyone can put their tuppence in. There really are so many hurdles, you need all the help you can get."

"And we fell at the first," says McEwan, laughing. Yes, but that's part of the grand tradition, Berkeley reminds him: think of all those great operas that missed their first opening night. McEwan nods. "True, but I daren't ask whether they made it to their second opening night."

Extract from For You

Charles: It does not touch me, this music of my younger self, when my name was unknown and I lived on nothing but sex and cigarettes and fast food, when I was in love again every other week.

I hear it clearly, each intricate part, I understand it, even admire it, but I cannot feel its passion, the longing, the sharp hunger, the lust for newness of that young man.

It does not touch me now. The car is ready, Sir! The usual table, Maestro? The Minister of Culture is waiting. A famous man with a rich wife — but the dimmed perception, the expiring powers, stamina, boldness, vigour wilting under the weight of years. The long descent to uselessness. Every man's fate, how banal it is, and still it makes me angry, the clock that's beating me to extinction. Stop! Enough! How can I make it stop?

• For You, performed by Music Theatre Wales, opens onOctober 28 at the Linbury Studio, ROH, London WC2.Box offi ce: 020 7304 4000. For You: The Libretto ispublished by Vintage (£5.99).